160 A CHERRY-COLOURED PIG. he expected at the close would be a sufficient compensation for the toilsomeness of the walk. At last it came to an end. The citizen went into the farmhouse, and accosted the farmer boldly enough: "Farmer," said he, "I have come and brought my friend, who is desirous of seeing one of your cherry-coloured pigs." Farmer looked surprised, and exclaimed, "They be all in the sty. He can go and look at them." So to the sty they went, and there beheld a progeny of fat grunters. "Why, friend John," said the Quaker, "these are all black ones!" "Well," said his neighbour, "and are there not plenty of black-heart cherries ? " The Quaker was a peaceable man, but he was out of temper; and in great wrath exclaimed, "John, thou art a fool!" This was not unnatural in the Quaker; but it is easy to perceive that it was the exclamation of puss, feeling that her catspaw had been turned to quite a different account to what had been expected. It is needless to say that, after this, the Quaker asked no more troublesome questions. 1 IT CONCERNING THE USES OF SUFFERING. A SERMON FROM SHAKSPEARE. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." T would seem that Shakspeare, in most of those pieces which are called comedies, intends to teach the refining and elevating power of sorrow, suffering, and pain, the hallowing influence of temporal afflic tion; we may read it in the Tempest, in the Winter's Tale, in As You Like It, in Measure for Measure, and others. Sorrow and suffering are never their own end; indeed, this seems to be Shakspeare's idea of Comedy-man, through opposing circumstances, rising triumphant over them; all adverse things ministering to lift a faithful spirit. The idea of a comedy, is a coming together, its etymology is the same as that of our word committee, both signify a coming together; and, in the comedy especially, we have the idea of all meeting together, a consentaneous marching to the beautiful and triumphant close. It does not seem thus while the trial and the pain are proceeding; "no affliction" can then seem "joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterwards, it yields the peaceable fruit," when the spirit is able to exclaim, "Sweet are the uses of adversity." It is a great saying, it is a wonderful faith which is able to say it. Longfellow, in some of his sweetest verses, has said :: "This life of ours is a wild Æolian harp of many a joyous strain, But under them all there runs a loud perpetual wail, as of souls in pain. Faith alone can interpret life; and the heart that aches and bleeds with the stigma Of pain, alone bears the likeness of Christ, and can comprehend its dark enigma." These lines may remind us that it is through the avenues of suffering and grief the great lessons of faith in immortality make themselves felt. Cardinal Newman has pointed this out in the Grammar of Assent, and has contrasted the wise and witty French essayist, Montaigne,—who was endowed with a good estate, health, leisure, an easy temper, literary tastes, and a sufficiency of books, and could afford to play with life and the abyss into which it leads us,—with the poor factory girl in Mrs. Gaskell's powerful story, North and South. "I think," says the poor dying girl in the tale, "if this should be the end of all; and if all I have been born for is just to work my heart and life away, and to sicken i' this dree place, wi' them mill-noises in my ears for ever, until I could scream out for them to stop and let me have a little M 162 THE STERN LESSONS OF ADVERSITY. piece o' quiet; and wi' the fluff filling my lungs, until I thirst to death for one long deep breath o' the clear air; and my mother gone, and I never able to tell her again how I loved her, and o' all my troubles;-I think, if this life is the end, and that there's no God to wipe away all tears from all eyes, I could go mad!" This is taking a long margin, when we draw in the great lesson of immortality to cover the bitterness and inequalities of time; and, perhaps, it may be doubted whether adversity ever really sweetens, unless into the bitter cup is pressed out some drops from the immortal essence. The sovereign lenitive for suffering, its divinest use, is in the assurance that an infinitely Blessed and Benevolent Will rules all, and that sorrow is attuning our harsh nature to become a chord for the utterance of a divine music which shall compensate for all the ills of time. It is dreadful to think how some natures are doomed to suffer. Mr. Jacox, that omnivorous reader and most pleasing moralist, amongst his many little interesting essays, has one on the "Blasphemy of Despair," a kind of commentary on the way in which poor human nature, in the exquisite reach of its agony and distress, will often "charge God foolishly," and desire, perhaps, even to "curse God and die." There is a scene in Mr. Charles Reade's Peg Woffington, a scene between a husband and wife, where the wife is, as we believe the wife has usually been, the restraining angel. They and their children are starving. She says:"James, we must pray to Heaven to look down upon us and upon our children." "You forget," says the man sullenly, "our street is very narrow, and the opposite houses are very high.' "James!" "How can Heaven be expected to see what honest folks endure in so dark a hole as this?" cries the man fiercely, though a much-enduring man hitherto. "James!" again exclaims the wife, with reproachful fear and sorrow, "what words are these?" The man gets up from his pen-work and flings his pen upon the floor: "Have we given honesty a fair trial?" he cries, "Yes or no?" "No!" says the woman, without a moment's hesitation, "not till we die as we have lived. Heaven is higher than the sky. Children," she says, lest the words of her husband should hurt their young souls, "the sky is above the earth, and Heaven is higher than the sky, and Heaven is just." In such scenes as these there certainly seems a contradiction to the teaching of the poet, "Sweet are the uses of adversity." "O Providence!" said poor Beethoven, " vouchsafe me one day of pure felicity. How long have I been estranged from the glad echo of true joy? When, O my God! shall I again feel it in the temple of nature and man? Never? Ah! that would be too hard!" So stern are the lessons of adversity. So various are the exquisite sorrows men and women are called to bear-women, perhaps, especially. We have seen wretchedness so exquisite, so piercing and harrowing, in the lives of women, that we have sometimes wondered that a woman should ever dare to marry. We have seen women who have been sub UNSUCCESSFUL LIVES. 163 mitted, by the cruelty of husbands, to a course of exquisite torture, when every feeling was stretched upon the rack; and who does not know to what an extent the milder and more amiable form of cruelty, the mere brutality of starvation and the blow, obtain among us? Oh, throughout this country and this world there are innumerable women who never sink upon the pillow at night, or lift their heads in the morning, but through streaming tears they lift up their pitying eyes to Heaven, they wring their hands, and exclaim: "How long, O Lord! how long?" There is a terrible catalogue of crimes, impeaching mankind against womankind, waiting for adjustment; and whatever the "conditional immortality" people may teach, it may be fairly hoped that, in the long run, the great judgment may fall upon the heads of sinners whose brutal hand or artistic science of cruelty have violated the holiness of a wife's love, or shattered the innocence of their children's natures. Thus, certainly, so far as the awards of time give to us the power of judgment, in many instances it seems impossible to say,— "Sweet are the uses of adversity." "There is something in success," wrote Laman Blanchard to Douglas Jerrold," that is necessary to the softening and the sweetening of the bestdisposed natures." And some lives never know success. The trials and sufferings of life often harden, but especially when it is not perceived that there is some real connection between what is suffered and, not what has been done, but what is to be done in us and for us. The old harsh verdict was, "Either this man sinned or his parents;" and the scarlet letter of vengeance puts its stamp upon the life. The sweeter thought, in the uses of adversity, is, that there is a value attached to human suffering, that it is the tuning of the instrument, the education of the perfect through imperfect sympathies, as Mrs. Norton very sweetly says:— "All that our wisdom knows, or ever can, Is this that God hath pity upon man; And where His Spirit shines in Holy Writ, This lady through life must, in innumerable ways, have been a great sufferer; a sweet and lovely woman, a woman of great pride, a woman of great genius, in how many ways her spirit was tortured and humbled. But suffering, in her instance, surely brought forth its sweet uses in that beautiful poem, "The Lady of La Garaye," from which we have quoted these true and tender lines. She seems to realize the truth of a very sweet little parable from a small volume which certainly ought to be better known. * *Spiritual Fables, Apologues, and Allegories, in Prose and Verse. By E. B. 1869. 164 FASHIONABLE SORROWS AND SUFFERERS. Camomiles. "You smell delightfully fragrant," said the Gravel-walk to a bed of Camomile flowers under the window. "We have been trodden on," replied the Camomiles. "Does that cause it?" asked the Gravel-walk. "Treading on me produces no sweetness." "Our natures are different," answered the Camomiles. "Gravel-walks become only the harder by being trodden down; but the effect on our own selves is, that if pressed and bruised when the dew is upon us, we give forth the sweet smell which you now perceive." "Very delightful!" replied the Gravel. In the world of suffering, some sorrows and some sufferers are very respectable. There is a suffering with a sort of regal Belgravian dignity about it, a kind of mosaic or porcelain Calvary, the roads to whose heights have been very carefully tiled with encaustic pavement, bearing the beautiful delineations of passion-flowers and forget-me-nots; and there are elegant Gethsemanes, fitted up with graceful prie-dieus and comfortable lounges, where grief, beneath the pressure of its great distress, may, with scented and black-hemmed cambric handkerchief, indulge its sorrows, and court the lenitive of a little notice and conversation by way of dismissing them. Ah, so great is the difference between real and simulated sorrows-sorrows meaning the crown of thorns, the piercing spear, and rusting nails, and sorrow in which the mourners are like mutes, mourning "by profession," or, as the author of "Elsie Venner" says of some widows, the intensity of whose grief can be judged by the depth of crape on the dress and the breadth of the black border on their note paper. There are those who estimate the value of all affections from the merely sensual side, like Sir Godfrey Kneller; when, at table, he referred to a haunch of venison just presented to him, he said of the donor, "Ah, there is a good man. He loves me. See what beautiful fat is in his venison.” There is another kind of sorrow and adversity, of a higher and deeper order than this, but still neither of the highest nor the deepest. Sorrow sometimes falls upon gentle natures, they accept suffering very meekly and unrepiningly, unmurmuringly they order their suit of sackcloth, they sit down among the ashes and the potsherds; as we look at them and think of them, we feel that they, too, like the Duke exiled to the wild forest, would have no difficulty in saying, means. "Sweet are the uses of adversity." We heard of such an one the other day, a friend of our own, who had sunk, by the vicissitudes of life, from almost ducal wealth to most scanty "And how does he bear it?" we said; and the answer came: "Well, he scarcely seems to feel, or to be able to feel, the difference. He never cared about money for its own sake, or for what it gave him; and if he were reduced to utter, abject poverty, and some one hearing of his |